The other day, the boy (Liam, that is) received an MSN message purporting to be from one of his friends. The message asked him if he recognised himself in the linked image. Of course, when curiosity comes in the door, sense goes out the window, and Liam clicked on the link. The rest, as they say, is another story; one of trying, and largely failing, to stem the proliferation of malicious codes that were taking over his computer. I spent almost the whole day - right into the wee small hours - trying to wrestle with the little buggers and minimise the damage. All of the computer's normal defensive arsenal was failing to root out the pernicious little bytes. Drastic (or should that be desperate?) action was becoming increasingly necessary as SpyBot and AdAware kept on finding more of the little buggers after they had both told me that the threat was over. My anti-virus software kept telling me that it had successfully deleted the trojans, whilst simultaneously saying that they were still there. There was nothing left for it but to save all the important data onto a DVD, which will be thoroughly scanned before being used, and reformat the hard-drive then reinstall Windows and everything else. No end of fun in my house! Liam, the culprit of the story, left me to it, while he and Paddy swanned off to spend the weekend at Paddy's gran's house in Dumfries.